Jessica Harry
Web Developer, Software Engineer, and Project Manager in Brisbane City, Australia
Health Care Reform Will Not Affect Medicare
The next myth was that health care reform would not affect Medicare. This one is kind of funny because right from the very get-go, the most notable cuts were specifically targeting the Medicare program. When you look at Medicare's portion of the overall federal, you can see that in 1970, Medicare was 4% of the U.S. federal budget, and by 2011, it had grown to 16% of the federal budget.
If we look at it over the last 10 years, from 2002 to 2012, Medicare is the fastest growing part of the major entitlement programs in the federal government, and it's grown by almost 70% during that period of time.
Because of how large Medicare is and how fast it's growing, it's one of the key programs that ObamaCare is trying to get a handle on, so it doesn't bankrupts the U.S. Medicare is going to be impacted, and in fact the initial cuts to Medicare have already been set at about $716 billion.